Audioslave - Audioslave (Review: MattJ)

Now, unlike Alex, I’m going in to this without having listened to any Rage or Soundgarden albums and no proper opinion of the band, so I’m curious as to how my review will differ from his.

The first thing that stuck out for me on this album was the riffs, they are very catchy and well… they rock. They make me nod along to the song which is always nice. Staying with guitar the solos are unusual and this I quite like, specifically on Gasoline. A problem I’ve always had is where a guitar solo just sounds like it was thrown in for the sake of it with no consideration to how it would sound with the rest of the song – Audioslave successfully avoids this.

Like Alex I am surprised I like this album. I mean its nothing groundbreaking; the vocals aren’t amazing and despite my previous complement neither are the riffs. Don’t get me wrong I still enjoy the riffs but they’re not going to make me eargasm. I like this album because it works; it isn’t trying to be groundbreaking, it’s just making some nice music. I hope it doesn’t look like I’m belittling the album in any way because an album that tries to be totally new and fails is a lot worse than an album that knows what it wants to do and is sticking to a formula. What I’m saying is Audioslave are not making the listener work in order to understand what’s going on, they can just sit back and enjoy, and the more I learn about Dan’s music the more I realise that this is type of music that Dan enjoys the most.

All in all this album is not without its filler, but is still a good album because of its enjoyable music and cool lyrics. It is not a complex album because it doesn’t want to be, I’m sure this album is very popular amongst Audioslave fans.

3.5/5